“Hi Martin
See you made it in to oracle magazine this month.That’s the pinnacle of any oracle professionals career – all downhill from here on in :-)”

I was not aware of my sudden raise to fame, but Richard is right – I’m in this month’s “peer to peer” section, which just gives some details about recent Oracle Ace’s I think. I’d forgotten that I had done a form they sent me before Christmas, answering a set of questions. It is interesting to see what they picked out of all my answers to include.

I think most of us would feel it is nice to see something about ourselves in print (so long as it is not derogatory or critical, of course!), though when I come to think of it, I don’t really know why it is nice – other than the rather self-serving feeling of having our egos polished. And as my friends I drink with would (and probably will) comment, my ego certainly does not need much polishing🙂. I’ve of course made it worse by blogging about how famous I now am. Polish, polish, polish.

Don’t worry, my wife stepped in to put me back in my place. “You could tell your mum when you next ring her – not that she’ll be impressed at all!”. Thanks wife. She’s right. My mum will just say “that’s nice” in a tone that in no way convinces me she means it, and will then proceed to talk at me about her new cats, what’s on TV and all the terrible things going on in the world, according to the “Daily Mail” (An utterly horrible and vacuous daily tabloid paper her in the UK).

So thank you for the heads-up Richard. I’m looking forward to the rapid decline of my career as you predict…🙂

Seeing as I did a blog post about looking forward to my second Norwegian Oracle User Group spring meeting, I suppose I should say how it went.

Given the circumstances, it went well and I enjoyed the conference far more than I would have enjoyed being home for those days. Part of the enjoyment was the reformation of the Martin Cluster as mentioned in my last blog. A small part of that was the slightly childish humour I found in those situations when people introduce themselves when they meet at such meetings. I’d be chatting to Mr Nash, Mr Bach and usually one or two others and when a new person came along and asked names, the three of us would take it in turns to say “hi, I’m Martin” – “I’m Martin” – “I’m Martin too”. It was like a poor take on the “I’m Brian” pastiche of the Spartacus movie. Most people smiled.

At the Speakers Meal on the first night Bryn Llewelyn suddenly said something like “Well, let’s take a picture of the Three Martins – it’s almost like the Three Tennors!” It had to be done, I dug out three ten pound notes so we could have a picture of the Three Tenners. If only the idiot on the right had held his the same way around as the other two…

The Martins doing a terrible “Three Tenners” joke

Thanks to Bryn for the picture.

So, why did I say the event went well despite the circumstances? Because I was ill thoughout the event😦.

I met up with some friends in London on Tuesday night before the conference, as I could not get into London and across to Heathrow in time for my flight in the morning. So I had to stay over. I know, you are all thinking I drank waaaay too many beers and was hung over the next day! I could not argue that I did not have several beers that night but it was more the 4 hours sleep and long walk that I blamed for how I felt. At the end of the evening I went out to Heathrow and I got directed to the wrong Premier Inn there {I was very specific about it being T5, I knew there were two hotels} and it took a while to get to this wrong hotel. Or rather half a mile past it. I new what side of the road the hotel was on (online maps with street view are so helpful) but it did not appear {as I am in the wrong place} and the bus driver who was going to give me the nod did so a stop or two too late. So I walked waaay back – and get told “Other Premier Inn sir”. OK, can you get me there “No, get a bus”. It’s midnight, the last bus was not so helpful. Shuttle bus? “No sir” Taxi? “Get the bus sir”. Sigh, not helpful. Well, that is what you should expect when you use budget hotels I guess. How far is it? “About 2 miles Sir”. I walked. It turned out to be over 3.

So when I met Martin Bach at the airport next day, I blamed the beer, long walks and lack of sleep. But as the day progressed I felt worse and worse and worse. Tuesday night might not have helped but this was more. We got to the venue and after lunch I did my talk on Row Level Security and masking data (which was packed, to my amazement) then checked into the hotel and went to bed. Thus I missed all other sessions. I managed the Speakers Meal (and it was jolly good, thank you OUGN) and then had a good night’s sleep. It did not help. The next day was a blur, half of it I was asleep but I did manage my second presentation, on Disasters oddly enough. Afterwards I went back to my cabin and only got up briefly to see about trying to eat some food, but the rough sea quickly made me decide not to bother. I managed two other sessions other than my own. One was a Martin talking (a very good one on making practical use of virtualisation) and the other was the Keynote by Cary Millsap, who did a talk that was more about life than Oracle. I had missed this talk at the UKOUG conference but had heard about it, so I was keen to see it. It was the highlight of the conference for me. I’ll probably do a Friday Philosophy on it “soon” but the main message was that Cary feels life always changes and it seems best when you are doing something to progress from a bad place to a better one, rather than ‘enjoying’ the better place. It’s a philosophy I have a lot of time for.

The last day was similar except that I seemed to perk up a bit in the afternoon and I finally got to see one or two more sessions. I did my final one, on “an introduction to tuning” and it was awful. I had a lot of material to cover and I knew I could pile though it on a good day, but this was a bad day and I simply could not keep my thread or progress through the material rapidly. *sigh*. At least there were not too many people there to witness the car crash. I’ll be interested to see how poor the ratings on my talks are.

So all in all I should count the event as a bit of a disaster. But I managed to honour my presenting duties and, despite spending half the time laying down in the dark, I had some fantastic conversations with people in the two evenings I managed to be awake. Oh, and thank you to the people who organised for them to play Happy Birthday to me in the Piano Bar at midnight on Friday (45 now), I might have been a bit quiet about it but I did appreciate that. It sums up half of what I like about the OUGN spring conference. I missed the first half, the excellent talks you get from what both years has been a very good speaker line-up, but the other is that everyone is around in the lunchtimes and evenings and you get to chat, find out other stuff, make new friends and just spend time with lots of people who are interested in some of the things you are, ie Oracle.

After the conference I did stay on in Oslo for a few day, my wife had come out to join me for my birthday weekend. We enjoyed the weekend but she kept on saying “you look dreadful” or “are you sure you are up to going out?” and “stop coughing you annoying bloody bas….”🙂 I’m still coughing now and feel pretty rough, a week on.

I’ll be sure to try and be there next year. I hope I feel better by then!

Well, I’ve just finished pushing the last few bits into my suitcase for my trip to the US for the Rocky Mountain User Group Training Days 2013.

It is a few years since I went to the US for pleasure (3 years?) and much longer since I went there on a combined work/pleasure trip – as I HATE going through US immigration.

I was tempted into this trip when I met up with a fellow OakTable member Tim Gorman at the Slovenia User Group last October. Tim was a true gentleman throughout that conference (and this is not to detract from the kind ministrations of Jože Senegačnik who was a wonderful host and also a fellow OakTable member) and he suggested I put forward a talk or two to the RMOUG training days conference. I was in two minds due to my huge dislike of being shouted at by the {I am sad to say, usually bl00dy unfriendly} members of the US immigration services. I mean, I went to Moscow in around 1994 and those chaps in the USSR were positively oozing cordial welcome compared to the hard-nosed and antagonistic attitude of the US chaps a year or two later!

Anyway, Tim swayed my opinion in a simple and direct manner. He mentioned Skiing. I went skiing in 1992. My one and only Skiing holiday. I loved it, I spent 2 weeks going from terrified starter to someone who could swish down Blue runs with the rest of them, the occasional Red run towards the end. Not Black, I saw enough sad-looking stretchers coming down from the Black runs as I sat in the bars at the bottom to think there was something to be scared of there – and when I chatted to the barman in my chosen watering hole he told me how so many of them were us Brits who had lost the brains to realise what our limits were.

So, I will be at the conference doing my bit about “first things to know about Exadata” and then I will be up in the mountains, scaring myself on hills that when I was 20 looked like a walk in the park…. What is the betting I do not get as far as Red runs this time?!?

I know, the usual phrase is “Life Outside Work” but I like to think that, no matter how much we may like our jobs, our overall life is the key thing.

I was prompted to write today’s Friday Philosophy when I was reading Neil Chandler’s blog a few days ago and saw that he had posted about his up-coming {and now in progress} Banger Rally. He and some mates are doing something very cool in their spare time, taking part in a rally from, basically, Calais in France to Naples in Italy, in a “banger”. This is a UK (and wider?) term for an old, tired, worn out car. The most they could spend on the car was £250 and it has to go over some pretty extreme mountain passes. I presume it also has to carry the set of 4 people involved too, so not a lot of weight there then, Neil🙂. You can follow their progress at this blog. I was in a pub in Leeds with Neil when he was considering one car for this rally.

I can’t claim that I do anything as striking as Neil’s current jaunt when not working, but I do like to spend some time doing things that are nothing to do with IT at all. For me, this tends to be physical tasks like cutting down trees with my chainsaw. Or building structures in the garden with wood (OK, half-building them – I constructed the below platform and another out into our pond maybe 18 months ago, both still have no balustrade around them and there is a 45cm gap between the bank and the pond platform – NEXT weekend I’ll maybe finish one. Maybe.)

Another garden task recently was building our wood-fired, mud-constructed pizza oven. My wife and I went on a 1-day course to learn how to make a mud-based pizza oven and then spent, ohhhh, about 10 days over 8 weeks building one! We dug a big hole in the garden to get some clean clay (we live in an area that is on top of clay), stole some straw from the horse that lives at the bottom of our garden (long story), bought some sand (because nicking it from beaches is both illegal and bad form) and mixed up our first batch of clay-sand-straw. Add in some old bricks and we got started. It took about 30 lots of mixture, a few alterations to the ratios as we went, but we ended up with this monster.

If you are wondering what the white stuff on the oven is, some ants decided to build their nest in the oven, between the layers I guess (you build the inner oven first and then add several extra mud layers to give insulation and a larger thermal mass, so that the oven stays warm longer).

Like anything, if we did it a second time we would probably make a much better job of it as we learnt so much from the first attempt. One of them was to invite friends with young children over to see us during the build. Kids love the idea of treading the mud mix and you can get a suprising amount of work out of a single ten-year-old (and very insistent I get the age right) German girl if they are allowed to get very muddy.

I found the whole process very relaxing (but very tiring) as you do not need to use too much brain power, slapping the mud mixture on the outside is deeply cathartic and you end up with something useful. Well, slightly useful.

Having built it we then had to learn how to fire it. As an ex-boy-scout I thought this would be easy. Getting the fire going is not too hard, you need to keep it burning well for about an hour to heat up the oven and, one big tip, don’t use any damp wood or wood that “spits” (like willow). Having a burning log explode and shower your almost-ready pizza with charcoal embers can lead to angry garden scenes and considerable bad language.

We can just about get a 9″ pizza in there. The pizza in this shot is actually about 6″. The oven was designed to take a 12″ pizza but, errm, I forgot to allow enough space to one side to push the fire into as well.

Another major thing to keep in mind? That arch! You can’t put anything in the oven that is larger than that hole. More importantly, you can’t get anything out that won’t easily come back through that hole. Sticking your arm inside to jiggle things about is also tricky as it gets up to around 300C! {for US readers – about a millon F}

As you can see, the results are anything but professional! And, compared to nipping down to the shops to buy a pizza and just slamming it into the kitchen oven, it takes a lot, lot longer. But you can drink beer or enjoy a bottle of win and sit in the garden whilst getting the mud oven fired and hot. Last weekend we had friends over and the ladies made the pizzas, I cooked them and the other gentlemen helped us work through the beer collection and ate. As for taste? Fantastic.

My wife is far more artistic than I and she makes decorative cakes, sews and now even makes hats when not auditing IT systems (Have you ever been involved in an IT audit and the person knows how to make lists and check them – but can’t plug in a PC? Well, Sue was once a DBA and also a Unix Sys Admin, so when she audits you, she finds what you are hiding!). As such, maybe as an industry we should encourage her hat-making

So what, if anything is the point of this Friday Philosophy, other than to show off my pizza oven and my wife’s hats?

Well, I see this outside work activity as important in the workplace as well, especially if you are having to manage people. Firstly, it is important, I feel, for us all to do something we really enjoy to relax and re-energize (and this can be “computers” for IT people, but as I get older I notice more of my friends who were utterly technology-focused in their 20’s are now moving more towards non-IT hobbies).

Secondly, what people do in their spare time can tell you a lot about the person and what keeps them happy. If they have hobbies that are artistic and their IT job is very regimented, it could indicate they would be happier with some more less rigid task in the mix, say some design work. If they have NO outside hobbies, you are probably working the poor dears a little too hard!

Thirdly, and I have seen this for real, you may have a person or a team that is not performing well in the office – but it turns out a lot of them do interesting and challenging things at home. Someone who can motivate themselves to be a part-time fireman or has the dedication to train each day for a sport has skills and energy. Why, as their manager, am I not seeing much of these traits in the office? Because they are not happy and/or motivated. So I have an issue to sort out. I don’t manage people at present, but I still find it interesting what people do and achieve outside the office as it can indicate that they have talents and skills not being seen in the workplace.

I wonder how I can introduce my chain-saw skills into performance tuning?

The last day of the three (and second on the ferry and of the conference proper) had a lot of talks I wanted to see, especially Dan Morgan talking about “Insanely large Databases”. It was a good talk, with an interesting interlude when a very loud announcement let us know we had docked at Kiel. Dan handled it with aplomb. Dan was talking about one specific experience he had suffered recently and he covered quite a few things I did and some I planned to but never got that far – but he had more technical details about the issues he had encountered, so all in all probably of more immediate use to the audience than my talk. It was a very good session. I have to confess, there were times I laughed out loud as memories flooded in, prompted by his wise words – I fear others may have interpreted differently but, honestly, I was laughing tears of shared pain.

I was also looking forward to seeing Uwe Hesse talk about Dataguard. I’d had the pleasure of spending a lot of time and a few beers chatting with Uwe over the last few days. His presentation was very well done (as it should be, he’s a professional trainer! He exceeded my expectations, though). And I loved the last bit, where he demonstrated how, under 11G R2 (R1 as well???), if you have a physical standby, a block corruption can be fixed “on the fly” and invisibly to the end user. I just love that feature and, though I knew about it already, seeing it demonstrated and the errors appearing in the alert log – though the user query runs fine – was sweet.

The rest of the sessions I saw were also good {Maria Colgan on preventing sub-optimal plans which was, mostly, about avoiding implicit data conversions, which I think all developers and designers should have drummed into their heads with rubber hammers; Doug Burns on those OEM performance graphs which continue to get better and better} – but I had to given in and go for a sleep. These anti-seasickness pills seem to work but make me dozy. I’d love it if those anti-travel-sickness pills were really placebos and I had a placebo side effect🙂

The last day was rounded off with a nice meal and one or two (or three, or four) beers in a bar and some excellent times. I of course spent time with the Other Martins (we could not disband the cluster too easily), Doug, Holger, Maria, our Norwegian hosts and many more of the other people there. If only I had managed to fit in the other 10, 15 people I wanted to see but I’m getting old and I was very, very, very tired.

I have to say, it was one of the best conferences I have ever been to. OUGN 2013? Get yourself on that boat.

I’m not really one for blogging about conferences – I mean who cares what someone else saw being presented? But this is the first time I have stopped moving long enough (and been in contact with the internet world) to blog and my brain is too fried to do a technical one.

The journey here was very smooth and the train from the airport to central Oslo makes the ratty, tatty, confined coaches of the UK look as awful as they really are. So I arrive in the central station and decide I will need some local Kroner to pay the taxi to the hotel. So I find an ATM, put in the card and ask for money. Card refused. Huh? But I rang my bank at the weekend and let them know there would be transactions from a foreign country (after some issues a couple of years back my wife always lets the bank know when she will be away and she made me do the same). I tried another ATM from a different company. Refused. OK, damned bank, I’ll use my other card. Refused. Errrr…… In a foreign country, no idea really where I am, not got any local currency. Not looking good.

I wander into Oslo looking for a real, proper bank. Most Norwegians speak perfect English, maybe if I still have problems I can go in and ask. Find bank, go to ATM, about to ask for money….Notice the figures being suggested on this ATM are a lot smaller than the last place. Yes, I had my mental decimal place in the wrong location and I had been asking for almost £1,000 rather than £100. No wonder the request got refused (I keep my daily limit low, it stops be buying too much rubbish on any given day).

So, I head off to the event, get there for Lunch and have a great afternoon. My presentation on IOTS went well and, as I said yesterday, I think I’ll put it to sleep for a while now.

I saw Harald Van Breederode talk about Oracle Database Smart Flash Cache before I did my slot and I always like to hear Harald talk. It was good as ever, but I found myself not so much interested in the idea of using SSD-type storage as an extra “slow SGA” extension (as opposed to a “fast storage” extension) but more that in 3 or 4 years, memory-based storage will be the default and a whole swathe of my knowledge will once more become redundant. I mean, how important will it be to keep physical reads down via things like IOTs once physical reads are relatively cheap? You won’t really care much about expanding your SGA with a secondary cache when you have 4TB of main memory and 100,000 IPS (inputs per second, we will have to see how much faster Output can be made with memory-based storage).

This highlights one of the things I really like about conferences, meetings and chatting to fellow techies in the pub. The actual main topic or point might well be interesting but the secondary thoughts and ideas can be just as striking. I was talking to Uwe Hesse after the talks had finished and part of that was about learning new stuff and training courses. It made me realise that it is way too long since I ran any training courses. I love running training courses.

OK, I’ve had a rest, back to socialising with fellow OUGN 2012 attendees.

I’m kind of expecting to get a bit of a comment-kicking over this one…

I never much liked mobile phones – Yes they are incredibly useful, yes they allow countries that lack a ground-based telephony network to create a nationwide system, yes they allow communication all the time from almost anywhere. That last point is partly why I dislike them. {Actually, I don’t like normal phones much, or how some people {like my wife} will interrupt a conversation to dash across the room to answer it. It’s just a person on the phone, it will take a message if someone wants to say something significant. If someone calls your name out in a crowd, do you abandon the people you are talking to, dash across the room and listen to them exclusively? No, so what act that way over a phone?}.

However, I hold a special level of cynical dislike for “smart” phones. Why? Because people seem to be slaves to them and they seem to use them in a very antisocial way in social and even business situations. It is no longer just speaking or texting that people do, it’s checking and sending email, it’s twittering and blogging, it’s surfing the net and looking things up. I have no problem with any of this, I do all of these things on my desktop, laptop, netbook. But I don’t do them to the detriment of people who are there in the flesh – whilst supposedly in a conversation with mates at the pub or carrying out a transaction in a shop or using the coffee machine at work or, basically, standing in the bloody way staring at a little screen or rudely ignoring people who I am supposed to be interacting with.

The below is my phone. It makes calls, it sends texts, it might even be able to work as an alarm clock (I am not sure). It does not do anything else much and it was ten quid {actually the below might be the version up from the really cheap thing I have}:

I was pondering this rude (ab)use of Smart Phones in a meeting this week. It was a meeting to discuss a program of work, what needed doing and by whom. It was a meeting where everyone in the room was involved, each person’s opinion was important and we all had a vested interest in the outcome of the meeting. So why did over half of the people not only have their Smart Phone out but were tapping away, scrolling through stuff, looking at some asinine rubbish on Facebook {yes, I saw you}? One or two people in the room might have been able to argue that they needed to keep an eye out for important emails or calls – but really? Are things so incredibly important and only you can deal with them that you can’t just play your full part in a meeting for an hour? I was so annoyed by this that I missed half the meeting internally moaning about it…

I just see it as rude. It’s saying “while you people are talking, I can’t be bothered listening and I certainly don’t need to give you my full attention. And I don’t even care that I’m making it so obvious”. Or “I am buying this item from you and we need to deal with the transaction but you are so inconsequential I don’t even have to pause this conversation about which cafe to meet in next week. You do not deserve more than 15% of my attention”.

I supposed that is what really gets my blood slowly heating up, it’s that it has become accepted to be so rude. Just walk down the street, head down and eyes fixed on your glowing little screen, making no attempt to navigate with your fellow city dwellers. I made a decision 2 {correction, 3} years ago that, if you are walking along staring at your phone and you are going to collide with me, you ARE going to collide with me if you do not become aware of me and make allowances – and I am lower down than you, I braced my shoulder and I am going to win this one. If they are so fixated on that bl00dy screen that they do not heed any attention to others, people ping off me like they’ve been thumped by a tree stump. It now happens a lot and I always “win”. I’m surprised no one has punched me yet.

If I was a manager again I would introduce a simply rule. No Smart Phone in your hand unless you have a stated reason for doing so. There are many valid reasons, which will all be related to the meeting. Otherwise you are just being disrespectful. If you feel the meeting does not apply to you or this section is not relevant, fine. Sit still and listen anyway. You might actually find it useful to know what everyone else is doing. Stop playing bl00dy mental chickens or whatever or updating your status to “bored”.

I will hold strongly to these opinions. Right up until the minute I finally buy that iphone I’ve been considering getting. I really want to be able to check my twitter account during meetings, you see.

For many, today is the last working day before Christmas and the festive season – So I sincerely wish upon everyone a Merry Christmas.. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, well the intent of my wishes still holds – I hope everyone; whether working or not; religious leanings for, against or indifferent; has an enjoyable few days during whatever end-of-year festives you have.

I’m going to be miserably now. You might want to stop reading here and maybe go to the shops for that last spell of retail hell or some other Christmas tradition. It’s probably best if you do…

You see, despite the best wishes above, generally speaking I am not a big fan of Christmas and have not been for as long as I can remember. It is not the principle of Christmas I am not keen on {I rather like both the religious and secular aspects of the whole thing, especially the seeing-people part like Di and Bri and ringing up old friends}, it is what Business does to it. Like many people, I really object to the bombarding we endure of advertising, selling and down-right commercialist bullying for what seems to be 3 months on the run-up to Christmas. I know, I know, many people make this very same point ad nauseum around this time. What ticks me off the most is that I don’t think it would be an easy thing to change, for the fundamental reason that the businesses that are so set on telling us that Christmas will not be as good as it could be if we don’t buy their food to make us fat/get expensive presents for the kids to break/buy this bottle of smelly stuff so we get more sex/buy this booze cheap, probably for the same reason as the smelly stuff {or to help ignore the lack of sex}/take out a loan to make this Christmas REALLY “special” and you can pay it off for the whole of the rest of the year and be miserable as a result, {pause to catch breath…} as I was saying, any business that sells more stuff as a result of their advertising, no matter how much it annoys other people or adds to the degrading of the whole Christmas experience, will do better than a company that does not. And so will out-compete less tacky, crass and manipulative businesses.

That’s the huge problem with Christmas and other celebratory times. We live in a commercial society and commercial selection pressure means those companies that can squeeze the most out of a situation to sell tat will win. They give not a hoot about if we enjoy ourselves really {we are back to the smelly stuff and booze again, aren’t we?}, it’s profit. Oh, if enjoying ourselves in some way aids them in getting more profit then they won’t object, but it is not in the company mission statement of 99% of companies – and any that it is in are doing it for cynical, commercialist reasons.

So, all successful businesses are Evil and are ruining Christmas for us all {OK, so that’s a bit of a big leap, stay with me….} So, have your revenge!!!

Next year:

Don’t buy stuff people probably don’t want. No adult wants 95% of what they get so….get nothing.

Tell everyone “I have all the stuff I need, buy yourself something instead – treat yourself on me”. You can buy the stuff you really want from the savings from point 1.

Having established the principle of reciprocal meanness above, that’s all that shopping hassle ditched.

Get normal food you like {and that does not play merry hell with your digestive system}. Preferably stuff you can freeze or keep a while, so you don’t need to go into the supermarket after Dec 20th.

Turn off the TV in December {or at least record everything and skip the adverts}. There is no decent TV in December anyway, it is all being saved up for the end of the month and, heck, even that is pretty awful.

Don’t read the paper. Or if you do, if you must, first four pages and last four pages only and scribble over adverts with a felt-tip pen. You’ll get the gist of world events and if your team is winning or losing.

That company you work for, that thinks paying you a wage means it owns your soul? It’s Evil, you owe them nothing they are not getting out of you already, so have a nice break at Christmas. {Unless you work at the same place as me, then they will need you to fill in for me as I will be on holiday}.

You will now be more relaxed, less stressed, have more time and generally be a nicer person. Take people to the pub, spend more time with people who like you being around (and this will be easier due to the people who no longer like you as you did not buy them any socks or a rubbish “humorous” golf book). Do things you actually enjoy. This year it is just going to be me, my gorgeous wife and the cat over Christmas and Boxing Day. The cat is really happy about this as we both like scratching the cat’s ears.

I might invite some neighbours over. They won’t come as they have to fulfil their awful Christmas Obligations – but they will like the fact they were invited. Heck, if they do turn up I’ll be in such a fine, happy mood I will even be nice to them.

I don’t carry business cards around with me. I just never, ever think to get some done (either properly or with my trusty printer) and maybe this says something about my personal failings to sell myself. If anyone wants to contact me I tell them my email address and if they look confused I just say “ahh, Google me”. You see, having a very odd Surname means I am easy to find. {Reading this back I guess it could be interpreted as saying “I am so famous you will find me” but that is way, way, way from my meaning – I am going on the very unusual name that I have and nothing other than that!}

If you google (Bing, Alta Vista, whatever) “Widlake” you will get, probably on the first page – Brian Widlake who was a BBC journalist and had a key interview with Nelson Mandela; Widlake Farm B&B down in Looe, Cornwall ; a court case with BAA (nothing to do with me); an accountancy firm called Holmes Widlake; Me! Hey, not bad for some IT geek! It shows there are not many “Widlake”s out there.

If you search on “Martin Widlake” it’s pretty much just lonely little me. This is good as it means I am easily found. In the past I’ve searched on the names of friends and found it really hard to identify the exact person as there are so many people called “Kate Bush” or “Nicole Kidman” or “Stephen Hawking”.

However, my suggestion is seriously flawed and I should know this due to a conversation I have at least once a week. “And your name is, Sir?” “Martin Widlake”. Pause, faint sounds of rustling paper…”I’m sorry, could you say that again?” “Martin Widlake, with an ‘I'” (rustle rustle rustle) “I’m sorry sir, I can’t find any ‘Woodlock’/’Woodlake’/’Woodleg’/’Wideleg’/’Wiglig’ at all.” {choose word of choice, there are several more}. Carefull spelling ensues and even then, something in the brain of some people cannot shake off the “Wood” and get to “Wid”. And yes, I know about the Martin, Martyn and suggestion about ‘I’.

I had someone come up to me at the OUG conference last week and say they had tried to track me down after last years’ event and could not. No “Martin Woodlouse” to be found. *sigh*.

“martin oracle” does not help, it finds that toe-rag Martin Bach {OK, I admit it, Martin Bach is pretty damned hot at Oracle, and oh so annoyingly a nice bloke), Martin Nash in Oracle Corp {fair enough, and again a nice bloke} , James Martin the cook {what the…? but that will please the realcuddleytoys}, oracle religious Association but I ain’t going anywhere near that…I’m a page or two in, which is not bad actually, I can be happy with that.

My wife has it just as bad. She had a nice, obvious Surname {Parker} before I conned her into marrying me {and I did suggest we adopt her Surname when we married}. She joined one company a few years back where, due to her speaking a couple of eastern European languages, they decided she was (phonetically) “Susan Vidlaaackay”. They seemed to find the real Surname more confusing than their assumption.

I tried to come up with a witty title but after only first day at the UKOUG conference, OakTable Sunday, my brain is already a little fried…

So yes, last Friday evening I received an email from Oracle Corp informing me I had been nominated for and been accepted as an Oracle Ace. I’d just accidentally blown away some of my slides for a presentation I’m giving this week and I was a bit weary of the whole community thing, so it gave me a real lift. It would have given me a lift anyway, but the timing seemed very nice – it re-invigorated me and it also meant that I could now mention my Ace-dom at conference. Endlessly. I never won prizes at school so this sort of thing goes to my head. Sorry.

Of course, my wife keeps my feet on the ground. I wandered over to the kitchen to tell her…
“Hey, Sue, I’ve just been made an Oracle Ace!”
“That’s nice dear – empty the cat’s litter tray while you are there, it stinks”.
*sigh*

It means a lot to me to be an Oracle Ace. I’m not going to pretend to be all unconcerned over it or say “oh no, not me, I am not worthy of that” like I did {and still do} over being a member of the OakTable. In the last 10 or 12 years I’ve done a lot for Oracle Corp (some of which is public, some of which was working with Oracle on testing things and talking to other Oracle customers about getting the most out of the technology) and also with the UK oracle community so I kind of feel the Acedom is an earned reward for that. But I am also very grateful for it, it is still a relatively rare accolade and Oracle have to feel that you are benefiting the wider community to bestow the award on you.

Being an Ace has already had some impact on me. I met my friend Neil Chandler at the conference, he is the person who nominated me (Oracle tell you who nominated you). “Hey, Neil, due to you I’ve been made an Oracle Ace! Thank you very much!”. “Great Martin, well deserved – so let’s have beers tonight and you can thank me properly”. “Errrr, I’ve been invited to an Ace meal this evening….”. “Well get you! Only just an Ace and too good for us commoners huh? You’ve changed, You’ve really changed….”

The Ace meal was good and much appreciated but I ate too much spicy stuff and boy I’ve got bad indigestion {and more unpleasant symptoms} now.

So it seems, based on evidence so far, Being an Ace loses you friends and makes you feel unwell. This is not what I was expecting….

🙂

{It’s OK, Neil and I had beers before the meal and he forgave me in the end – on the condition I provide him with more beer soon}